Orange you the happy banker?

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This article was published 16/04/2015 (3295 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Peter Aceto clearly relishes his role as the cool banker.

The CEO of Tangerine (formerly ING Direct Canada) runs the “direct” bank from headquarters on the farthest northern boundary of Toronto, about as far away from King and Bay streets as he can be and still claim to be based in Toronto.

“Being not like the other guys is very important as to who we are,” said Aceto, who will be speaking to the membership of the Information and Communications Association of Manitoba (ICTAM) next Thursday in Winnipeg at an annual event they call the Innovators.

“We need to be different and distinctive, and we need different types of employees,” he said. “It’s part of the roots of our creation.”

Since starting in Canada in 1997 — it has about 1,000 employees now and Aceto was its eighth — there are close to two million Canadians who use the online bank’s focused suite of products such as savings and chequing accounts, mortgages and mutual funds.

You might think in the very sophisticated, competitive, jam-packed financial-services marketplace Tangerine must have given out an awful lot of toasters to lure that many customers.

Heck, it doesn’t even have a credit card offering, which is not expected until the end of the year.

But the tiny bit more that Tangerine pays in interest on its savings accounts, as well as its well-executed virtual customer service offering, has been a proven winner.

When the Bank of Nova Scotia paid $3.1 billion for ING Direct Canada in 2012, the former Canadian subsidiary of the Dutch-based bank had about $30 billion on deposit and was the largest bank deal in Canada for the previous decade.

This for a service that currently offers 1.05 per cent interest on savings with no minimum balance as opposed to most of the Big Six banks that effectively don’t pay any interest until there is a balance of $5,000 and then average about 0.8 per cent.

But clearly the brand is worth more than a 0.2 per cent interest bonus.

Aceto, who embraces his bank’s online-only existence by maintaining an active social media presence — said the company’s different-ness is what makes it so valuable.

He says the new owners at Scotiabank understand that very well.

“They knew that if they intentionally or unintentionally infected our culture with theirs, our clients would know, and that would not go very well for the business,” he said.

Friends and colleagues warned him at the time he was being naive, and when it came to meddling with the DNA “they (Scotiabank) would not be able to help themselves.”

“But it’s been two-and-half years now, and they have been very disciplined about it.”

Scotiabank is likely fairly happy with its new junior bank, as business keeps rising and profits are growing. Tangerine — which changed its name from ING one year ago — has been averaging about 100,000 new clients per year. Aceto said they expect to attract 130,000 this year.

And it’s all done without any branches except for “cafés” in Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and two in Toronto Aceto says serve as “3D interactive billboards where you can interact with our brand.”

Even though the bank was born online and has scorned the bricks-and-mortar model, a brand-new mobile pop-up experiment using a tricked-out shipping container located in a north Toronto shopping mall parking lot has become an attractive new marketing vehicle for the bank.

The pilot project is four months old and Aceto said “it has significantly overachieved our expectations.”

Aceto said the plan is to send out 10 to 15 of these Tangerine shipping containers across the country in the next few years.

That’s still technically not bricks and mortar.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca